Norma led Gordon to Ron’s room and opened the door. Gordon’s heart, which had been bending and twisting ever since the night of his fiftieth birthday, finally buckled. Ron was a bag of bones under his blanket, his eyes turned to the ceiling, his mouth opening and closing silently as if he still had to get the last word. Where had he all gone? He was the size of a cat. Gordon drew his breath into his chest and followed his mother in.

UP NORTH

Up north

The wave stands up enticingly on the outer bank, dark-faced against the gauzy grey air. Gordon slides across the water to the take-off spot. He glances to the inside to check nobody is taking the wave. Madness—there is nobody—but a lifetime of being hemmed in by competition, overtaken by the younger, the fitter, the better, is a hard habit to break.

He pops up and trims across the wave, so silken underfoot it feels like a fourth element, a kind of plasma. He turns his eyes to the horizon and takes in the view from the black cobbles at the base of the headland along the line of forest that stretches to the north, the lagoon inlet a morning’s walk away. Not just a beach; the idea of a beach. Everything in its right place. Beneath his feet, the crumbling wave casts a shadow onto the green-ribbed sand floor.

As the wave empties into the channel, he steps onto the tail of his board, flips it up, and falls softly prone onto his stomach, in the same motion swivelling into his paddle back to the take-off spot.

‘You looked blissed out,’ Ben says when Gordon joins him.

‘You’re enjoying it?’

‘Wait, what?’

‘The solitude.’

‘The solitude? But you’re here.’

‘Nitpicker.’ Gordon splashes water at Ben and pivots for the next wave. He is too far behind, and it leaves him.

‘Nobody else in the water and you’re still missing waves!’ Ben quips, stroking into the next, a better one. Gordon watches him rip three frontside turns and disappear into the pit before emerging in the channel, tilting his board up so he can fall back onto it and paddle, effortlessly, back out. One of the sad things about having a teenaged son, he thinks, is that the boy doesn’t realise that when he competes with you, you want him to win.

‘Going in, Dad! I’m meeting someone!’

Gordon stays in the water. Even though he has this break to himself every day, he still can’t believe his luck, so he surfs like a chipmunk, storing waves against some bleaker future.